Bring the Noise_The Jürgen Klopp Story

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2018 by Raphael Honigstein

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  Nation Books

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  Published in the United Kingdom as Klopp Bring the Noise by Yellow Jersey Press in 2017

  First Trade Paperback Edition: February 2018

  Published by Nation Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Nation Books is a co-publishing venture of the Nation Institute and the Perseus Books.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Typeset in Baskerville MT Std by Jouve UK, Milton Keynes

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017963207

  ISBN: 978-1-56858-957-2 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-56858-958-9 (e-book)

  E3-20171226-JV-NF

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. The Surprise–Glatten 1967

  2. Rose Monday: Zero Hour–Mainz 2001

  3. Revolution 09–Dortmund 2008

  4. The Road to Anfield–2012–2015

  5. In the Game of the Father

  6. Wolfgang Frank: The Master

  7. ‘Schönen guten Tag. Hier ist Jürgen Klopp’–Dortmund 2008–2010

  8. Pump up the Volume–Liverpool 2015–16

  9. Starts and Stops–Ergenzingen, Frankfurt, Mainz 1983–2001

  10. Fire on the Rhine–Mainz 2001–2006

  11. One, Two and Almost Three–Dortmund 2010–2013

  12. Chaos and Theory–Liverpool 2016–17

  13. Small-Screen Triumphs

  14. 60,000 Tears–Mainz 2007–08

  15. In Times of Fading Light–Dortmund 2013–2015

  16. LFC and Beyond

  Photos

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  List of Illustrations

  Index

  For Mama and Papa

  It ain’t where you from, it’s where you at.

  Eric B. and Rakim

  1. THE SURPRISE

  Glatten 1967

  The Black Forest isn’t black. It’s not even a forest. Not any more. Eighteen hundred years ago, the wild Germanic tribes of the Alemanni first tore through the massed gloom that had so scared the Romans, to make space for cattle and villages. Celtic missionaries from Scotland and Ireland, armed with axes and faith, kept pushing inward until nature was bested, iniquity contained. Today, the remnants of the darkness mostly serve as raw material for children’s nightmares and cuckoo clocks, as well as a magnificent tourism brand.

  From all over the country and beyond, they flock to the low mountain range in Germany’s south-westerly corner, to clear their lungs and hearts of all urban squalor. After the war, the Black Forest became a favourite of a film industry searching for an unsoiled backdrop, an idyllic setting for health clinics real and imagined, one of those places where fantasy and reality could blend into one another to enchanting effect.

  Cynics beware, because it is, of course, all true–in the picture-perfect town of Glatten. The neat white houses with their gingerbread rooftops and wooden balconies, unpretentiously pushed up against the hills, keeping watch over endless slopes of green. ‘Others build on top of the hill, to show off their splendour. But Swabians build their houses into the hill, to hide how big they truly are,’ explains former Green party politician Rezzo Schlauch about the modest mindset of the local inhabitants, his kinsmen. ‘They will keep the Mercedes in the garage and put the VW in the driveway.’

  The river Glatt (Old High German for bright or smooth) flows down from the north into the tiny town that borrowed its name, past the steel-clad J. Schmalz GmbH vacuum technology factory. The river is a discreet chaperon to the high street (car dealership, bank, bakery, butcher, florist, a doner kebab stand) and hesitant supplier to the natural swimming pool, flowing out again next to the sports ground past Böffingen, a village that’s been absorbed by Glatten proper.

  A difficult climate–there’s a lot of rain–makes this a paradise won, not given. They grow grass, corn, piglets and people of fearsome resolve and frugality here; an extreme type of Germans, harder than hard-working, unwilling to give themselves an inch. ‘Schaffe, schaffe, Häusle baue’: you work, work, then build a house; that’s how the famous saying in this region goes.

  ‘To toil day and night is a big part of being Swabian,’ says Schlauch. ‘That has its roots in history, as has the Swabians’ reputation for being innovative. In other regions, the first-born would inherit their parents’ farms. But in Swabia, the land was partitioned equitably among the children. The farmland got smaller and smaller until it was no longer viable, so the descendants were forced to take up other jobs. Many of them became inventors and Tüftler, people looking to find new solutions to old problems.’

  Local custom demands that everything must be done studiously, seriously. Including fun. One of the fourteen active social clubs in Glatten is dedicated to ‘Carnival’. Another one brings together friends of the German Shepherd Dog.

  Barns line a little street dotted with lumps of clay left behind by tractors, and then it’s here, right next to a field: Isolde Reich’s ‘Haarstüble’, a petite hair salon, discreet meeting place, outlet for charity socks hand-knitted by one of Reich’s friends. The proceeds go towards buying shoes for the homeless.

  Isolde was born in Glatten in 1962, the younger of two sisters. Her father Norbert, a talented goalkeeper, was a sport fanatic. Thwarted by a serious-minded father–‘he insisted Norbert should have a proper vocation, not try his hand at becoming a football pro,’ Reich says–his career was over before it had really begun. His sporting ambitions, however, were undiminished. He played amateur football, handball and tennis, and tried to pass on his passion to his family. When his wife Elisabeth and eldest daughter Stefanie showed no inclination to take up any game, Norbert’s hopes centred on Isolde. Before her birth (‘In my album of baby photos, he wrote “Isolde, you should have been a boy, actually,”’ she smiles), and after. ‘I was the first girl in all of Glatten to go to football training.’

  Norbert was her coach, his methods exacting and demanding. He took five-year-old Isolde to practise heading on the Riedwiesen football pitch next to the river, where an old heavy ball on a rope hung from a green iron bar. If her body positioning wasn’t right or her arms were too high, Norbert sent her to run a lap around the pitch for punishment. ‘He was tough but just. A man of principle, full of passion,’ Reich says.

  In the summer of 1967, her mother left the family home for a month. Elisabeth was heavily pregnant, and the risk of complications made it necessary to check into a clinic in Stuttgart, 80 minutes away to the north-west. The local hospital at Freudenstadt, just 8.5km up the road, wasn’t equipped to perform caesareans. It was hard for Stefanie and Isolde to be without their mother for such a long time. ‘We were promised: “Mum will bring something amazing for you when she c
omes back.”’

  When Norbert and Elisabeth arrived at the house, however, they had a tiny baby in their arms, screaming its head off. After an hour or so, the sisters wondered whether it couldn’t be taken back and exchanged for something different. A small, shrieking brother–what a lousy surprise! But Isolde soon realised that she had been given much more than a second, annoyingly loud sibling that day. ‘All of my dad’s sporting focus shifted immediately on to the boy. I was relieved from practising headers with the pendulum, allowed to take up ballet and athletics instead. Jürgen’s birth was my good fortune really. He set me free.’

  2. ROSE MONDAY: ZERO HOUR

  Mainz 2001

  Christian Heidel loves the story so much, he’s beginning to wonder if it’s actually true. ‘As a Mainzer, I could say: let’s make this up. But it really happened,’ he insists, readying himself for a mental hyper-jump: from the corporate blandness of his Schalke 04 office to a city lustily singing and dancing in a confetti rain, and a tiny, hopeless second-division team banished to a distinctly unsexy, provincial exile forty minutes away by car.

  The day before, on 25 February 2001, FSV Mainz 05 had played their bogey side SpvGG Greuther Fürth and lost 3-1 at the Playmobil-Stadion. ‘Klopp was a little bit injured and the worst man on the pitch, he had to come off twenty minutes before the end,’ Heidel says. The defeat plunged Mainz deep into the relegation zone. ‘We were am Arsch,’ the former FSV general manager smiles. Quite literally in the bottom of the table, with no discernible light at the, ahem, end of the tunnel. ‘We had 3,000 people at games on average, nobody cared about us any more. Everybody was sure we were going down.’

  His colleagues on the Mainz board were all in the city centre, revelling in the Rose Monday carnival festivities for which the capital of Rhineland-Palatinate is famous in Germany. Half a million people dress up in silly costumes, get a little tipsy and a little flirty. State broadcasters ARD and ZDF devote an entire evening to the four-hour meeting of the city’s carnival clubs at the Electoral Palace, a potpourri of beer-soaked gags and political satire.

  Eckhart Krautzun, the well-travelled Mainz coach (nickname: ‘Weltenbummler’, globetrotter), deemed the temptations of the carnival too great for the team ahead of a very big game at Duisburg on Ash Wednesday. ‘After losing in Fürth, the shit had hit the fan in Mainz. We knew that they would either axe the coach or set light to our backsides. We were secluded in a hotel in Bad Kreuznach for three days, so that no one got out and about,’ says FSV midfielder Jürgen Kramny, Jürgen Klopp’s roommate at the time.

  Christian Heidel had stayed at home in Mainz. He wasn’t in the mood for partying; the team’s situation was too dire to act the fool. It was obvious that the coach had to go. Krautzun was a very pleasant man, no doubt, an experienced operator who had once coached Diego Maradona in a game for Al-Ahli FC in Saudi Arabia, the national teams of Kenya and Canada, as well as a raft of clubs around the world, but six points in nine games since he had taken over in November was the kind of run that was heading straight for relegation. Heidel also felt that Krautzun had somewhat tricked him into getting appointed in the first place.

  His predecessor, the former Belgian international René Vandereycken, had been a gruff, monosyllabic coach whose refusal to communicate with players, board members and officials was matched only by his reluctance to put forward a coherent playing system. He was fired twelve games and a meagre twelve points into the 2000–01 season, with Mainz in the relegation zone once more. Heidel wanted someone in charge next who could re-implement the successful back four/zonal marking system that the former Mainz coach Wolfgang Frank had introduced six years earlier, a tactic seen as so modern and advanced at the time by Bundesliga standards that almost no one knew how to make it work.

  Heidel: ‘I told everybody that I wanted a coach with a sense of understanding of a back four. Somebody who could practise it, who could teach the players. All of a sudden, I get a call from Krautzun. I have to be honest, I hadn’t thought of him at all. He’d been at Kaiserslautern before, it hadn’t really worked out for him there, and I had the feeling there was no point. But he kept on talking and talking until he convinced me to meet him. So I went to see him in Wiesbaden. He proceeded to explain everything about the back four in great detail to me and I thought, “Fuck me, he really does know his stuff after all!” I had seen so much of Frank’s training that I knew exactly what the specific exercises had looked like. So I appointed him coach. About two weeks later, Klopp came up to me and said that Krautzun had called him a month before. “He wanted to know how the back four works, we spoke for three hours.” And that’s what it looked like on the pitch. We won one game in the beginning and then it all went tits up.’

  Getting rid of Krautzun was the sensible, easy decision. Finding the right successor proved much harder. Heidel tore through a mountain of Kicker yearbooks, hoping to excavate a suitable candidate. ‘There was no World Wide Web then. You didn’t know who coached at Brugge, for example. In any case, these types of teams were five times our size. Different times. There were almost no foreign coaches in the Bundesliga either. You were fishing in the same pond the whole time.’ After a while, Heidel closed all the books and admitted defeat: ‘I thought the only chance left for us was to somehow get to the point where we played like we had under Wolfgang Frank. But I couldn’t find anyone. I had no idea who could do this job.’

  Maybe Heidel found inspiration in the jesters parading through the Mainz streets on the day when normal rules didn’t apply. He was out of sensible answers. The only logical move left was to plump for the downright absurd. If there was no right coach to be found, maybe the answer… was to go without one?

  ‘I thought “Let’s do something spectacular. We should coach ourselves.”’ There were ‘enough really good guys and intelligent players in the squad’, he says, to make that crazy idea work, they could teach those who had arrived after Frank’s time at the Bruchwegstadion. But football being football, someone still had to be in charge. Heidel chewed over putting himself up. ‘I could have told them how the system works after attending so many of Wolfgang’s sessions, but I had never played a single game in the Bundesliga, not even in the Oberliga [fourth division]. That would have looked stupid. That’s why I gave Klopp a call in his hotel room in Bad Kreuznach. He had no clue what was coming.’

  Heidel informed the veteran right-back that they couldn’t carry on with Krautzun, that they had to make a change. ‘I said to him: “I think you are uncoachable. The stuff we play here–or want to play–to be successful, nobody in Germany understands. You, the team, understand it. But it doesn’t work out with any of the coaches.” Klopp still didn’t know what I was getting at. Then I said: “What do you think about us coaching ourselves? Someone has to front it, and that should be you.” There was silence on the other side of the line, for maybe three, four seconds. Then he said: “Great idea. Let’s do it.”’

  Heidel called captain Dimo Wache, the goalkeeper. ‘Kloppo was the real captain, but Dimo had the armband. Dietmar Constantini [the coach prior to Krautzun] had taken it off Klopp, because he always complained about tactics. He was into tactics unlike any other player, he spent a lot of time thinking about it. Constantini had also taken him out of the team for a spell. Kloppo on the bench, that doesn’t work at all. It’s funny when he complains about players complaining today, you should have seen him then…

  Harald Strutz, the debonair Mainz president, was busy fulfilling carnivalistic duties as a leading member of the Ranzengarde, a nineteenth-century guard of faux soldiers mocking Prussian militarism. ‘Heidel called me and said: “We have to sack the manager, urgently,”’ Strutz says, sitting in his neat office at Mainz’s administrative headquarters in a corporate block outside the city. In the lobby, there’s a glass cabinet with FSV merchandise, including a special version of Monopoly with Klopp and Heidel on the cover. ‘Krautzun was very proper. He wanted to stay in the job but we told him it’s over. So I took off my Ranzengarde unif
orm and drove to Bad Kreuznach. Everyone’s partying on Rose Monday in Mainz but that doesn’t mean everyone’s drunk. Well, I wasn’t, otherwise I wouldn’t have driven there. We asked Kloppo: “Do you think you’re up to it?” He didn’t hesitate for a second: “Yes, absolutely. Yes, of course.”’

  Strutz pauses for a moment, taken aback by the incongruity of the most important decision he’s ever presided over at Mainz. He’s a local politician for the Liberal Democrats and works as a lawyer, there’s a copy of the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, the German civil code, on his conference table. Strutz is, in summary, a pretty serious man. Not the kind of club boss you’d expect to get swept up by the Schnapsidee (flight of fancy) of his general manager. ‘It’s a very special story,’ he continues. ‘That was the beginning. Why should we change that? If you knew what it looked like here then… It was an extraordinary achievement to keep the whole team together. An extraordinary start to such a coaching career. This extraordinariness still fizzes in the mind.’

  The ten local journalists who arrived for the FSV press conference at Bad Kreuznach the next day weren’t as elated. Heidel: ‘They already knew that Krautzun was gone. We confirmed it. Then this one journalist, Reinhard Rehberg, who still works today, said, “What is Klopp doing here?” They all thought we would appoint the assistant coach as caretaker manager but I don’t think we even had an assistant manager at the time. So I said, “Kloppo will be the coach here.” The whole table roared with laughter. They all cracked up. They took the piss out of us the next day in the papers. People believe that everybody cheers Klopp all the time but he wasn’t the Klopp of today, he was the Klopp of then. He was a player, he didn’t have a professional coaching badge, he had studied sport science.’

  Klopp knew that the reporters didn’t believe he was in any way qualified to save Mainz from the drop. He made a joke about his own inexperience, pretending he didn’t know the script. ‘You have to tell me what I have to say here,’ he commanded the press corps with a broad smile.